MissPickwickian wrote:
There are two of me: The true me, the person I am on Wrongplanet, the eleventh-grade Holocaust scholar who self-educates, loves her mother, and cares about the downtrodden, and the second, false me, who exists only to ridicule the true me, it seems.
The true me is a product of genetics, upbringing, and education. The false me is solely the work of the culture, especially libertarianism and Generation Y academic perfectionism. The false me thinks I'm weak. The false me is angry because I have "unprofitable" talents like creative writing instead of worthwhile ones like salesmanship or power brokerage. The false me makes fun of my favorite writers. The false me believes all emotion to be sentimentality. The false me believes that sex is a waste of time, and a dirty, shameful one at that (the true me has accepted sexuality as a part of life). In other words, the false me is a Nazi. She's like a screechy cross-breed of Ayn Rand, Ann Coulter, my chemistry teacher, Donald Trump, and a pit viper. And I can't get rid of her. Any article I read with a "libertarian" bent (e.g. "The Disgusting Emotionalism of Holocaust Memorial Day," " How Ignoring the Poor Will End Poverty," "Why We Don't Need Psychiatry: Pull Yourselves Up By Your F---ing Bootsraps, You Neurotic Whiners") activates her and sends her on a tirade against me. I wish I knew how to kill her.
I thought the same when I was your age. I would think there were two conflictive sides of me, the intelligent/successful/controlled one and the clumsy/emotional/hopeless one. Gradually I understood that the former one (which you would call the "false" one) was not actually a part of me; it was only the "me" other people wanted me to become. It was the mask I had to wear so people would not get scared of me, of meeting the inner me. It was the "me" I had to behave like so people would accept me.
I'm slowly trying to remove that facade. I'm slowly reclaiming my right to be me.
And my negative fact: I allowed my family to steal ten years' life from me.